Benjamin R. Barber
Is a Senior Research Scholar at The Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the President and Founder of the Interdependence Movement, and Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Rutgers University. From 2007 - 2012, he was a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos.
As a political theorist, Barber argues for a renewed focus on civil society and engaged citizenship as tools for building effective democracy, particularly in the post-Cold War world. His current work examines the failure of nation-states to address global problems, and argues that cities and intercity associations are more effectively addressing shared concerns. Benjamin Barber has been a Senior Fellow at the USC Centeron Public Diplomacy since 2005.
Barber was an outside adviser to President Bill Clinton and a foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign. He has advised political parties and political leaders in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Italy on civic education and participatory institutions, and has done the same, more controversially, with civil society and government leaders in Turkey, the Emirates, Libya and China.
The son of theater people, he has also been active as a playwright, lyricist (libretto for George Quincy's opera Home and the River) and film-maker (The Struggle for Democracy, with Patrick Watson; Music Inn, with Ben Barenholtz).
